Welcome to another regular feature on The Writer’s Scrap Bin: Friday Fun-Day. Every Friday I’m going to dedicate at least one post to something fun, like interesting facts about a famous writer, literary crosswords, etc.
Today’s Friday Fun-Day post is a writing prompt. Three or so weeks ago my mother brought to my attention a particularly entertaining trend on Twitter. Marc Laidlaw tweeted “The first line of almost any story can be improved by making sure the second line is, ‘And then the murders began.'” As you can imagine, Twitter had a lot of fun with this concept, taking famous first lines and following them with “And then the murders began.” Thus #LaidlawsRule began.
In addition to getting a kick out of the tweets, I was inspired to create a new writing prompt.
Find a generic, horrible first line and add “And then the murders began” or some variation of it. Use this combination as the opening to a story and keep writing.
I haven’t had the time to fully pursue my idea yet, but I will put the opening as an example:
“Around here, strawberries don’t ripen until late spring. And then the murders begin.”
Make the first line as hilariously terrible as you can. Have fun, roll with it. When you’re done, post your opening in the comments. I’d love to see what everyone comes up with.
